Recruiting workers is a crucial part of the healthcare system, and you will find that a different approach is required compared to most of the recruiting processes. We went ahead and scouted the best practices out there to share and discuss them with you.
Keep Increasing Your Candidate Pool
To start your recruitments process with the right foot, you have to start building that candidate pool early and keep expanding it. You need to have a system for on-the-job training sessions with the candidates, as it must be included in every healthcare worker. The students need as much first-hand experience with different scenarios to ultimately find the ones where they strive best and choose their specialty. There will be cases where students will purposefully avoid some clinics or hospital networks due to bad reputations or other reasons.
Now, from a recruiter’s point of view, you have to keep in mind the culture of the facility. Always look to put yourself in their shoes, understand their needs, and try to be upfront about the shortcomings that the facility is currently experiencing. Being honest about them and acknowledging them will mean a boost of trust.
Many healthcare facilities start the recruiting process even before the prospects graduate medical school. A strategy that is better known as campus recruiting, constantly staying in contact with educational institutions, certifying agencies, and training facilities.
Maintain a Verification Process
Training and certifying healthcare workers require education at an accredited and qualified facility and passing certain exams like the NCLEX and many other tests. Always make sure to check the students have successfully passed their exams and have received board certification (in the case of doctors). Some tools allow you to look into a particular doctor and check if they are board-certified, no matter you are a patient, recruiter, or healthcare worker.
Commonly, each state keeps a tight record of its certifications. Additionally, you also can use an HR platform for your staff, which can greatly help in sorting through the information on the candidates, including their certifications.
Use the Proper Channels
After you have identified the candidates that you want to pursue, finding the right method of contacting them can be the deciding factor in successfully filling a position. For example, if you have a prospect you haven’t communicated with since your university years, it can be tricky to find the right approach.
An important part of the strategy is to have an established brand as a recruiting agency or as a healthcare facility. It mostly comes down to having a consistent style throughout all the channels, either through messaging, email, or phone calls. You can find some great templates of emails on LinkedIn that you can use to kickstart things. Ideally, you shouldn’t use them as-is, and rather more than a source of inspiration – try customizing it around your core business.
Websites such as Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Indeed, SignalHire, or CareerBuilder stretch across multiple industries. And you also have multiple job portals that are healthcare-specific, like MyCNAJobs, which serves as a portal for people with CNA training. Other good sources of information are Medical Jobs, Healthcare eCareers, or the JAMA network.
Focus on Employee Retention
In an industry with such a high turnover rate, facilities that treat their workers right have the least problems when it comes to keeping staff. Overall, in the industry, the better part of the turnover is generated by factors that are outside the facility’s control, such as big pharmaceutical companies, the government, or insurance companies. Let’s go through some of the best tips you could follow regarding retention. Let’s go through some of the most impactful benefits you could offer to your workers:
- Help if relocation is needed. Offering to assist with relocating can be a turning point for most people that are involved in multiple recruiting processes, and you can attract more talent this way. It is a key point in developing a reputation for the quality of your patient care and the treatment of your employees.
- Continuous training. As science is constantly evolving, healthcare workers need to always stay updated on the latest tests and discoveries. Things such as what drugs should be used in combination with specific conditions. It is the only way to ensure that your workers will provide the best quality of healthcare there is.
- Access to amenities. The best way to make people feel they are best treated is to provide access to free or discounted food, access to a fitness gym or a daycare for their children.
- Proper leave. Talking about options such as vacations, maternity, or medical leaves that should be offered to every employee by default. Offering appropriate amounts of leave for new parents can be such a relief as it’s not so common in today’s day and age.
Maintain the staffing levels
An understaffed facility is the biggest nightmare of a healthcare worker. And the levels of stress are not the only thing affected, as also the quality of the patient care will most likely drop, which will lead workers to feel like they are not having such an impact on the facility. This will contribute to the burnout phenomenon and, in the end, increase the turnover.
By having more workers, you make sure the patients are being properly handled, you won’t have to function from one crisis to another, and the workers will help fill each other’s gaps of knowledge.
Make Investments in the Facility
The other big part of the equation, besides the manpower, is having up-to-date tools. Using the latest software is very important, as the graduates have recently trained on it and it will better manage the patient care.
Final thoughts
By having a proper strategy planned for your recruitment plan, you can achieve a facility full of long-term doctors and nurses and not just temporary workers who give up or change their minds after only one or two years. Having a proper foundation will attract prospects. Making solid promises of flexibility, benefits, and compensation that you will eventually uphold is the key to building a successful facility in the healthcare sector.
